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by rwmj 2829 days ago
I doubt YouTube would ever have been successful if it had required this level of explanation.
4 comments

Half of the explanation here consists of explaining the very-slightly-different-but-still-entirely-natural ontology of PeerTube, to people who were expecting exactly the ontology of YouTube.

For someone who has never used YouTube as a content creator, a "Getting Started" guide for PeerTube would actually be quite short.

I'm not sure what exact word you're looking for, but it's not ontology
In trying to figure out what word you were looking for, I realized the word his migrated from philosophy to computer science and changed meaning a bit. So maybe it works in that context. Sorry.
A very cromulent explaination. Thank you.
You mean because the word "ontology" has been embiggened a bit?
lets go with the Ux concept of "Mental Model"
paradigm
This website isn't a service, it's the website for a piece of software you can download and host yourself. So it's not really comparable to Youtube. Explanation/documentation is normal for that kind of site.

If you want the equivalent to Youtube, take a look at something like https://framatube.org/

Or any of the instances listed on https://instances.joinpeertube.org
The fact that there is an entire Medium article on how to "get started" essentially guarantees it's a non starter.
The presence of a Medium article is not a reliable indicator of anything (except there being someone writing Medium articles about it).

Case in point: "Recipe: Medium-Boiled Eggs" https://medium.com/@corey_nelson/recipe-medium-boiled-eggs-7...

See, that's why medium-boiled eggs have never caught on.

;D

Or the lack of anyway to monetize your content other than link to a method for accepting donations.
Content creators on PeerTube could do in-video product endorsements.. that's already a fairly standard practice on YouTube, which does support monetization.
It's a bit of chicken and egg problem though. To get in video endorsements, you need to get very popular. To get very popular, you need a more popular platform than peertube.
It depends. You obviously need a millions of subscribers to promote the 'appetite suppressant' lollipops - and you need a TV to promote the new life insurance brand. But to triple the sales of HackRF, a couple of thousands niche auditory is enough.
Sponsorships are only one form of monetization. The competitive feature for content creators here is ad revenue sharing.

The only thing I got from reading this write up is that it will be pretty easy for someone to create their own instance and throw ads on someone else's content.

It seems like for many creators on youtube the ad revenue sharing is no longer a notable source of their income.
For the top 1% of the top 1% maybe. Keep in mind that this is long tail distribution and many creators rely on ad revenue.

That long tail is what drives growth for these platforms anyways.

Most YouTubers now use Patreon, in-video ads, referral codes, etc.

Plenty of huge YouTubers don't use any YT ads at all.

All (well, almost all) the videoblogging in China is monetized by direct donations.
Which payment processors do they use? Is it managed by the video hosting platform or a direct transfer via e.g. WeChat Pay/Alipay?
The amount of money you make off youtube ads has fallen off a cliff, almost all big content makers rely on patreon these days.

Even for millions of views on a video its typically less than $100

Is there a source for this? It wouldn't surprise me but I'd like to read more about it.